Monday, March 14, 2011

My main hit level 30 in Rift over the weekend, and I've also got a pair of alts at level 15 with crafting skills in the 120-range. As a result, I'm starting to get into the real "meat" of the game, with some things I like and some I find concerning.

Solo Difficulty
On my extremely durable Cleric, I'm very satisfied with the difficulty of solo content. I don't die that often, but I do end up pushed to the limits of what I have at my disposal to stay up. The only downside is that a lot of the difficulty comes from mobs respawning on top of you while you're clearing an area out, which really hurts my squishier alts.

(The mage in particular feels like a bad deal - you lose a lot of versatility and a lot of durability in exchange for a bunch of different ways to do ranged DPS, but it doesn't feel like the sheer levels of damage are that much greater.)

Also, the exp curve has been pretty much perfect for my playstyle - I dinged 30 on the very last quest in Scarlet Gorge, and I was always within a level or so of the quests I was working on. (I could see this being more of a problem if you were also doing PVP and dungeons for loot.)

The Dynamic Game
Like most non-instanced content I've seen in other games, Rifts and zone invasions are a lot of fun when precisely the right numbers of players show up. Soloing a minor rift is fun, and beating a major rift with 3 people is a lot of fun when all the pieces fall into place. Less fun is having 6-8 DPS show up, wiping, and having the public group scatter rather than stick around to see if anyone can switch into a tanking and/or healing role that could win the fight with the players at hand. Finally, as I discussed yesterday, scaling for really large groups sometimes seems to result in an extremely lengthy but non-threatening fight.

In general, I stop to fight any rift or invasion that I run into, and I generally try to join each zone-wide invasion event at least once to see the sights. If I do get a repeat, though (I think the Werebeast in Gloamwood spawned five times while I was working on the zone), my willingness to drop everything and ride all the way across the zone for a few dozen planarite drops rapidly. Likewise, it gets a bit old when you have to fight off an invasion to respawn your quest hub, you go off to complete the next few quests, and return to find the place destroyed and camped by mobs yet again.

Crafting
I posted about crafting last week, and I've made modest progress since then. One thing that's striking about the system is that you really don't need a lot of raw materials to get crafting skill points - you can make an item for a guaranteed skill point and then salvage it, getting a third to half of the materials back. My level 30 character has been able to harvest enough stuff to feed two separate crafting alts, both of whom are now crafting level 30-ish gear.

The catch is that obtaining recipes can be more challenging. Either you need reputation with local adventuring factions - obviously, my alts don't have this at low levels - or you need to do daily quests for tokens. Worse, the daily quests offered are based on your crafting skill, meaning that you can lose access to them if you gain too many points. If you're near a cut-off between tiers, you're better off NOT gaining that next point until you have enough materials to gain 10-20 points, so you can open up a new work order to replace the one you're losing access to.

Outlook
The next few levels should be interesting, as I unlock 32-point root abilities and then have a bit more flexibility to pick up mid-range stuff in a secondary soul. I also haven't tried any PVP or dungeons yet, so that's another area that I can hack away at going forward. Finally, there is another faction to try, and apparently two leveling paths from 36-50. There's definitely a lot of stuff left to do in the game.

That said, the rift content is the thing that this game has and the others I could be playing right now do not. So far, it's been hit or miss, and the real hits have come at times when there are fewer people around in my level bracket (e.g. because I stopped to level a pair of crafting alts while everyone else leveled past my main). Right now, I expect that I will pay some additional money for some additional time in Telara, but I'm not running out to buy the six-month plan.

1 comment:

I hit 29 on my cleric this morning, and I'm just barely entering Scarlet Gorge. I haven't thought I've been doing all that many rifts and such, but when finishing up Stonefield I was always a level or 3 above the quests.

For my cleric, I'm mostly using the Justicar/Shaman tank spec even to solo. It feels tough, and the dps is a bit slow, but not terribad. OTOH, going into my inquisitor build and AE'ing 4 mobs at once is kind of a rush, but pull a 5th or don't quite get everything off at the right time and it's faceplant city.

I'm also enjoying my mage (level 26). I've avoided the necromancer build up until now since it seemed kinda FOTM, but now that I've tried it. . .wowzers. I'm using the "upgraded" melee dps pet and it does enough damage that it usually ends up tanking anyway. DPS is so high that vs single mobs they die in 10 seconds or less. I haven't tried AE really, due to the squishiness of the mages, though. I don't think I could pull off solo kills of elite mobs like I can with the cleric, though. I could be wrong. . . soul purge is up most of the time and heals the pet, so perhaps tank pet, plus necro heals, plus soul purge could do it. Time will tell.

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About Player Versus Developer

I'm what they call a "WoW Tourist" - WoW was my first MMO, and being able to set my own schedule is a dealbreaker. At any given time, I can be found ducking in and out of half a dozen different MMO's.

This blog details some of my own personal exploits, but it also focuses on a meta-gaming issue that I find very interesting - the decisions developers make on how to reward player activity, and the decisions players make in response to maximize their own rewards.